


When the Hurlyburly's Done

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Gotham (TV), Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
Genre: Dreams, Gen, anthropomorphized city, possibly disturbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 20:16:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3394991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When will the carnival come to Gotham?</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Hurlyburly's Done

**Author's Note:**

> This story owes a lot to several of the central conceits of the game, Fallen London.  
> The title comes from a line in the play, Macbeth.  
> I am not associated with the production of Gotham, and this school is not associated with the production of Gotham. Ray Bradbury wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes; not me. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

Late in the summer, every year, someone- usually someone new- will ask: When are we going to Gotham? Usually, it's someone who hails from the surrounding area, someone who's heard of Gotham and its pleasures, but never had the chance to sample them. In their former life.  
Then, someone else- usually someone who's been with the carnival a while, who's had time to tire of the question and cycle back like clockwork to finding it worthy of an answer- will say...

The carnival will give you your dreams- it has them to spare, for dreams are what it's made of. The babe's cold cry, rising through the sea of the pre-dawn hour, daytime still an impossible league away, woken from who-knows-what. What dreams can one have when one is yet a dream, newly broken into the waking world? Why, specters of separation, phantasms of coldness and hardness. The eternal nightmare of living out one's life as a human being.  
The carnival is the day-time frights of dozing children, curled up like little eggs upon the mat on the schoolroom floor, or asleep in their own beds. The child wakes, in its empty room, in the mid-afternoon silence, such a large and solitary space for such a small piece of life, opens its mouth and screams in despair of being alone. Until some concerned party rushes into the room, to reassure the tot that, no, the world has not evaporated in half an hour.  
It's the toiling, grinding nightmare of a young adult, slotted into a little space for sleep, like all things are slotted into little spaces when you've woken from the dream of childhood to a world that expects you to know it and know yourself. Comical, downright silly dreams of walking into class after singing away an entire term, to find that it's exam day. Funhouse mirror terrors of great, ponderous brains in tadpole bodies, or of a single marble rattling around in a cranium like a stadium.  
Then, in later adult dreams, those terrors don't change, but just gather more onto themselves, like great tumbleweeds of gray dust. As if to prove that one never really becomes a grown-up, just a slightly older child. That child is a fraud, and it lives in a filthy house, and it has an inane occupation, and it will die stupid, irrelevant, alone and forgotten.  
Later still, come the end-of-life waking deaths, those horrors that are simply the encroaching inevitability of falling asleep and just not waking up.  
The carnival is made of hopes, too. Without these kinds of dreams, the other kind don't taste as sweet. What's more toothsome than the hope, dashed? Baby longs for reunion with Mother, and finds it for a second in sleep, only for its waterlily brain to remind wordlessly that it's now its own plot of flesh and blood. Little kids wrapped up in feathered nests find those feathers blown by rough winds to the four corners. All of your aspirations to growing up big and strong and beautiful and wise deflated as twenty dawns on your skinny arms and pimpled forehead and failing marks in Calculus. You've been on earth for thirty or forty years, and you can feel your body dying, but immortality is possible, if only metaphorically. You will do something that matters! No, you won't. Only those close to the end get spared, if only a little: they fear death, sure, but it's a gentle fear; the fear of not 'if', but 'when'. In 'when', there is still somewhere to go; it's one of life's paradoxes: in the most dire certainty, the human heart can scrape out something lovely. “If I make it back home, one more time...” “If I see one more summer...” “If I get to dance the tango at least once before I die, that's enough for me.” Sort of boring, isn't it?  
Now, imagine if a few dreams long-ago broke off from the whole roaming flock, just hared off into the blue, and found a place to settle themselves. I say 'found', but of course I mean 'stole'. These were the dreams of conquerors, dreams of approaching modernity, of fortified settlements and fire and metal and steam. These were like those of the carnival, but they were never dreams for traveling; the dreams, themselves, dreamt of taking root. They found those roots in a little band of unpleasant men who crossed the ocean to a new land, slaughtered the land's original inhabitants, burned the trees, ate the beasts and birds, then built up the land and called it-

That's right! They called it Gotham. A happy place for the kinds of dreams the carnival likes- only, they've changed a little bit, because traveling dreams are of a different temperament than city dreams. Traveling dreams are always lean, because they like to keep moving. Let the wind draw them up like an old handbill. Let the water spin them like the cup of a dry leaf. Let them be borne like brambles on the doe's coat. City dreams, however, like to grow fat, into big and rolling things that spread across the land and plunge down into it. Soon, everything that grows there is strange and tangled, the progeny of dreams. Soon enough, the offspring will have dreams of their own, increase the fold. All of the dreams will intermingle, spin themselves together, create allegiances, battle and consume each other. Live and die. Become gods.  
Did I just say that?  
Gotham will consume them all- dreams and inhabitants, both. She'll turn them into her.

Here come strange dreams.  
Curled up on a nightclub table, too tired to drag himself home after closing, a man swims through the conquest-dreams of a child, rising to the surface in the man like he once rose from Gotham's waters. The city could have let him die- as she does, so many!- but she knows better than to eat something before it's done cooking. He still has a lot of time left to simmer. Gotham loves oddities; he nurtures them, will provide for them and let them prosper while happily choking the life from the true and wholesome. Isn't that sweet? The man dreams, as the city does, of consuming, of taking in more and more until he's bloated, sick with it. Gotham understands. This is, of course, Gotham's dearest dream. The difference between the two of them is that Gotham always gets her way. Imagine the man as the carnival's great main tent. What would happen if its central pole were cut? Why, it'd collapse, of course. When Gotham's ready for the man to die, the great empty space left in his wake will fill up like a great bowl with the blood of those fighting to get what he had. He'd like that, wouldn't he?  
Here are the spun-sugar dreams of a sweet girl in a sweet little castle with a sweet little existence. So, why does everything taste so bitter? In the long satin afternoon drunk-dreams of a living doll, made to be loved, but loved by no one. Unloved, she'll sit on the shelf. Imagine if she were a real doll. No Ice Maiden, her, for she's far too warm. Her beauty isn't glacial, it's not too good to be true; it's almost true, almost alive, but not quite. In the carnival, she'd be in the waxworks, where nothing ever moves or changes, and history will unfurl before your eyes for the price of three tickets. Tell your friends.  
It's poetic! That her erstwhile paramour is the sun god, a young Phoebus, a sharpshooter- for the rays of the sun never miss. Show him a target, and his shot will hit home. His assistant is a woman who wears her heart not on her sleeve, but right over her actual heart. It's an anatomically correct rendering, too- see how it glistens in the light? A bit gory, maybe, but those are just paillettes, not actual drops of blood. When he takes aim, he'll shoot her right in the heart- see how she thrills, just before and just after? That isn't blood staining her lips, either; just lipstick. See, she gets back up again. She's fine. Wound around each other, they frown into dreams of firecrackers that poot soggily in your hand. Gray mornings that promise sunshine, if you'll wait, but gasp out into rainy afternoons. Adventures that don't turn out like you'd planned.  
Wait! There's a dreamer missing. Close the doors. Lock the gates. You can feel the city frown. He gives up his dreamers grudgingly. Especially ones as rich as she who is missing. If the city can love- of course it can- it loves her. It's loved her since it knew her in the kitten dreams- cloud-soft fur and little needle claws- of her childhood. Dreams of taking down the people who made her life so needlessly violent and grim and hard. Even as a child, her dreams are plush with death, and also with wealth and power. Gotham is charmed. He helps her to clear her way, to grow up into her dreams. The Strong Woman can lift anything! Not since the great Sandwina has there been such a marvel of both feminine beauty and feminine strength! All comers welcome to test their mettle against hers! Where her head now lies, Gotham knows not, but the city will have her back.  
In the Strong Woman's place, Gotham now has a Strong Man. He's not much of a replacement; he can't lift anything heavier than a bottle. He can't even lift his dreams anymore, has been dropping them along the way for years. Sticky-sweet taffy dreams of being the city's champion, clearing her of the horrors that choke her streets and edifices. The city doesn't like that; it turns him into a clown. He's even funny in his sleep, thrown slack-faced across his office chair, his hat over his eyes like a cartoon character. Gotham keeps him around, though. They love to laugh.  
Acrobats! Gotham has acrobats. She twists like a cat! He swoops like a bat! Together, they tell a story of passion and betrayal, rivalry and thwarted affection. The acrobats are only children, though, so it's a stilted little pantomime- but not without its charm. The audience dreams of a time when the show will ripen into reality, when the children grow up to be adults who can truly play their roles. Gotham knows that one day, this will be so- with the anticipation of one who yet hasn't finished dinner, but who can smell a freshly-baked pie waiting in the kitchen- and can wait. Until then, curling up wherever she can find a safe place, the girl offers small, fretful dreams about finding a mother she's beginning to suspect doesn't want to be found. In his great, empty mansion, the boy creates dripping operatic confections on the return of parents who are beyond even Gotham's reach.  
There's a little girl selling flowers to throw at the end of the acrobats' performance. Gotham doesn't look too closely at her dreams when it consumes them.  
If you're interested in something a little more cerebral, why not visit Mr. Know-It-All? All of human knowledge unfolds before your eyes when you ask him your most urgent questions! Whether it's scientific facts you want, or an answer to a more personal query, he knows, well, all. If you're looking for puzzles, he has plenty of those! No Sunday morning brain-teasers for him, but riddles unheard since the Sphinx stalked the earth on paws of velvet. They come to him in his dreams, and he's always dreaming. Has he ever been awake? That question, he won't answer. You probably shouldn't ask.  
But you could always ask Janus, named, of course, for the two-faced Roman god. The present is unknown to him- for he's blindfolded, you see- but with one eye, he can see the past and, with the other, the future; that which is certain and that which is still up in the air. All he says of the future will come to pass. Gotham loves him. To be beloved of a city, especially a city like Gotham, is to live forever. Your triumphs are eternal- though, so are your failures. Every event leaves a mark, and those marks never fade. Don't ask yourself why he's blindfolded. Imagine, instead, how good it would be to live forever.  
Finally, there's Gotham's little jewel, subject to a sudden sea change. Made anew, the boy is composed of pure nightmare-stuff. Tucked in among the baroque, the recondite, are the mundane abandonment woes of a child left behind by father who was grossly unfit, anyway. The Lost Boy, he'd be, in the carnival. It'll cost you a lot more than all the tickets you could buy- more than all the money you have in the bank- more, even, than you probably want to know, but if you pay the price, he'll tell you how you die. And when, down to the second. It might not seem like much, but think about the only other being who knows such a thing.

And what do you dream of, Dear Reader?


End file.
